Major Project Proposal
Major Project: Character Design
Proposal
Challenges
Planning
Design
Inspiration
References
Main Proposal
For my major project, I have made a specific choice of what area of 3D art and I have gone in to, following the design, experimentation and outcome of what I want to do; I am aware of a variety of different professional ways of approaching games design however I have large interest in to creating new and unique models and characters which is the main focus to my personal project. Keeping in mind what I am wanting to peruse after university, since I feel more interest in to creating new unique characters and how they can interact in the environment designed for them. The area of 3D character art I am working with is is a custom made creature in as a centre piece for my major project. I have considered software, concept designs and different ways of achieving my finalized aim for the deadline of May 2023. I find experimenting with different concepts a very valuable step when creating characters or any art asset to give a more in-depth development process and to experiment with the appearance and personality of a character, as well as the importance of experimentation to give a more diverse appearance and approach to the project.
With my major project since I am doing character art, I explored different character options such as humanoid, robotic and insect based, this is because with character art there are many routes to approach and I wanted to find what I felt most comfortable and most confident creating with my current skills I have developed. The character I am developing, is from my personal project outside of university as well which is called a Nymayridian Vaiposick. This will be the focus of the project and any I will face several challenges with this especially with wanting to design a unique new concept, one of the main struggles I have had with designing a unique new creature is that, a lot of animals and insects get referenced or used as inspiration to start developing new concept ideas and for me to think about the anatomy of my own creature I would have to do this too.
The reasons I’ve chose this particular type of character design is because after university I want to go down the route of focusing into creature or monster based character art and doing my own project I can have free roam and any inspirations and can properly think about the anatomy of the design and how it could happen in a realistic environment. As well as this, I have found a couple of character artists I’ve been looking in to for research and developmental knowledge of what skills I can implement in to my own project.
Challenges
The main challenges I have with my major project evolve around the design of my character. As I am creating a monster/creature based character it is very easy to look at several inspirations and copy what they are without realising. I have to keep in mind what my references are however more importantly what I want out of my own creature and model. A lot of characters within this genera all follow similar ideas of looking to insects and other creature characters as inspiration and references, this can cause a lot of unwanted or unintentional similarities within designs and this is something I am very conscious about, so I have gone on to add some features I will use throughout the Nymayridian species to help keep it uniform but unique with an exoskeleton like chitin.
The next major challenges I had were to do with the concept drawing and the anatomy of the creature. During the start of the planning I was still very unsure on what i wanted my character to look like and this is part of the reason I ended up doing 4 designs in different ways. The original shape block out drawing of the creature mostly helped get a general understanding of how the creature should start looking where as the next design allowed me to experiment more and see how I want the anatomy of the character to look. Since I want my character to be unique I didn’t base the anatomy off anything specifically however for my design 4 the one I am creating for my assignment, I used some personal photography of a queen ant from the species known as Lasius Niger commonly found in the UK (Wikipedia Contributors, 2019a).
All 3 ant photos taken by myself on my old phone, Samsung Galaxy S9+
Planning
During the process of my character design, I am using a software suite called Zenkit (Axonic Informationssysteme GmbH, 2016), as it allows for charts similar to ones found on Trello (Trello, 2014), but also a perfect tool for me to visualize the construction of my assignment by using pages to make up a web diagram. I found this very important for myself as it allowed me to develop the visualization of the character at this stage without the forming of concept art, aiding me in designing concepts later on.
This has been very useful for quickly exploring what routes I could go down for my character as well as associate it with a design plan with images and text describing each of its features individually.
I have chosen to do my Nymayridian species Vaiposick which is a flying creature, something i have not done yet and had chosen this as a new learning opportunity for myself allowing me to learn the anatomy and mechanics of how a flying creature might look or behave.
This creature fits my main theme of wanting to peruse character design after university as well as developing my skills further experimenting with new techniques and methods I might not have done previously in the past to achieve a high quality and professional result. To help myself achieve such result, I will be using multiple pieces of software to aid in this; ZBrush (Pixologic, 1999) to do the main bulk of the work by sculpting, Substance 3D Painter(Adobe, Substance, n.d.) to create a texture set that fits my model and an undecided piece of software to do a render of my model at the end.
Design
The process I’ve gone through designing the Nymayridian Vaiposick. Originally I started off with two main foundations. Written and basic shapes to help get a feel for what might work for the concepts. The feature list being a easy documentation of things I want my character to have to help keep it unique as well as the simple shapes being an easy way to get some basic sketches of multiple bodies and forms; from design stage one I went on to refining each one of the simple sketches into something a bit more shaped which allowed me to visualize each one better of what it would look like in 3D and during designing it in ZBrush.
After refining each design a bit more, I chose the one which felt the most natural and fitting for the worded description I had previously made. Design 4 is the one I chose to refine for a better side view and a top down view keeping in mind of how the anatomy would work and making it unique all at the same time. Part of the unique aspects of this are down to the body features like its tail, ribbed spine and arrangement of its wings.
The Nymayridian Vaiposick full worded description
the creature category is a Flying lesser species similar to a Vusasait in some respects however does not rely on a toxin to paralyse its targets. Instead it has a ranged attack, it has some form of rapid growth chemical within its tail where it grows a form of quill/spine to fire at a target at great speed. it is not as fast as a bullet from a kinetic rifle such as a humanoid creature may use however this spine it fires has enough kinetic power to pierce thin metals. it is mostly a flying swarm creature and is not very effective against larger targets. Lighter armoured Xevaks have been known to fall to these creatures however their main target is infantry particularly clustered troops. There is reason to believe there are different Evolutionary variations in Vaiposick depending on which hivemind controls them and if they have a gene spinner.
All the above images, are personal photos i have decided to use for my major project to help with some research into anatomy and textures. The reasons will be explained below, Anatomy on the left. Texturing on the right.
For anatomy for my Vaiposick I decided to look in to some more insects and arachnids for different types of anatomy for different views and to better understand how the anatomy of insect legs work primarily. The Nymayridian Vaiposick will feature 4 legs similar to that of which can be found on common insects such as Spiders and Ants. I had included an image i took of some ant alates to help myself get an understanding of wing placement on a thorax, but also to be able to look at the structure of the wings and how their size corelates to the body to get them to be airborne in the first place.
Doing this gives me some more understanding of how to apply the same features on to my own creature as I will be needing to keep in mind of a realistic anatomy. Primarily for the thorax and leg placement more than anything.
The Images of the turtles were originally research in to the textures however I saw these as a real life example of a feature that is used in some of my inspiration images and a feature I will be putting on my own character. The shell is layered in steps giving a spiked and jagged effect the tail of the crayfish also shows something like this which will be very helpful as this will be present on my own creature however it might be more exaggerated.
I hadn’t given much thought in to the texturing of my creature until the end of my design process and was also very unsure on how I want it to look. I started looking back in to some of my old photography at some of my own pets being the turtles, their shell shows different patterns and some natural colours on their hardened shells. This is useful for my own character as it features an exoskeleton like carapace which will have a semi-realistic texture for the end of my project.
One of the turtle images show it with a damaged shell being rather patchy and dark as the water did not contain enough nutrients for their shell to harden properly at that time. I used this to give another example of how natural hardened chitin like structures can have detail and gradients depending if their environment is fully suited to their needs. The red crayfish also felt like a valid example to use for my research examples in to textures and chitin like surfaces. The Crayfish claws and upper body show some very impresive colouration and grooves in which the exoskeletyon has to help give movement to the otherwise rigid structure of the body. This will be helpful when it comes to creating my Vaiposick and how it should be to give some natural range of motion for the head and other parts of the body.
Inspirations
More of my other inspirations come from existing game universes to give me ideas and different thoughts on how to design my own creature character. My main inspiration for the Nymayridian species as a whole has been the Warhammer 40k Tyranid species (Wiki Contributors, 2005). Which are also a hive mind driven species of alien origin and follow a very creature like appearance for each of their units. As well as this, I have looked in to another game universe set in StarCraft by Blizzard Entertainment (Blizzard Entertainment, 2019), featuring another hive mind based alien race known as the Zerg, The Mutalisk unit in this game has been one of my key inspirations for creating my Vaiposick. A combination of these different references have give me a good idea on which way I want to take my designs. For example these two units from different universes have some things in common which i will be taking and using in my own design, primarily being the design of the carapace on them. They both feature a form of ribbed or layered shell that protects the unit, on my own creature i will be doing this to help give the creature a form of exo skeleton and armour. On my selected design of my Vaiposick i would be adapting a key feature about the Mutalisk (Fandom Wiki Contributors, 2010), which would be the tail. I wanted my design to have a tail as a weapon similar to the mutalisk however i did not want it to function in the same way, In game the Mutalisk (Fandom Wiki Contributors, 2010) fires a parasite from within its tail at its enemy, My own design would follow firing a projectile from its tail but in a very different way and different type of projectile all together. I would design mine to fire a form of spike that is grown in the tail and pertrudes out the tip.
The reference images from both H.R Giger (Giger, 1976) and Rodrigue Prailer (Pralier, 2014a), I had chose both of these for their similarities too during my consideration of my choice in character. I wanted to explore biomechanical designs to design myself, this would have included cables, wiring and tubes such as found on both of these creatures in reference. It would of helped make it clearly look like the biological part of a design would be integrated with the mechanical aspects of it.
I have had a look around at several different inspirations for my creature, as researching other known artists, games and insects is very helpful for making my own form of creature based character. I did look in to artists at the start of my development stage mostly for how which type of character I want to make as this helps me envision how my character would go on to looking as well as what type of creature I would be making.
A Key artist I was looking in to was Rodrigue Pralier (Pralier, 2014b), who formerly worked on the Mass Effect games (Electronic Arts, 2021) ; who has a broad range of characters ranging from robotics and humanoids mostly however this did help me decide what type of character I would be designing and developing because I could visualize what I wanted from my project viewing different models and how they are designed; in turn this quickly helped me realise I would not like to do a humanoid character or creature and I want to design another creature/monster based design and would look on for more inspirations later. Another artist I explored was also H.R Geiger (Wikipedia Contributors, 2019) and his work on xenomorph’s combining biological creatures with a mechanical twist. I explored H.R Geiger primarily as I have interest in both robotic and creature based characters and was looking to combine them both, however I chose not to with my current time frame and skill set.
I feel that using a broad array of inspirations is very important for my designs to help give it some more unique elements as I can see easily what is already existing to help make my own original creature, as well as giving a wide range of possibilities and ideas during the conceptualization.
Below i started looking towards some more units from the Warhammer 40k Universe (Wiki Contributors, 2005) to help better understand the use of the carapace and armouring on the models since i will be replicating a similar type of hard surface scuplting for my own creature, seeing the different shaped models and sizes with different approaches to their design of the carapace helps me get a better understanding for how to make it look more natural and give my own creature its own unique look with its exoskeleton.
References
a-z based on author
Adobe, Substance (n.d.) Substance 3D Painter. Substance 3D. Available online: https://www.substance3d.com/.
Axonic Informationssysteme GmbH (2016) Zenkit Suite. Zenkit. Available online: https://zenkit.com/en/.
Blizzard Entertainment (2019) StarCraft II Official Game Site. StarCraft II. Available online: https://starcraft2.com/en-us/
Electronic Arts (2021) Mass Effect Legendary Edition – EA Official Site. Electronic Arts Inc. Available online: https://www.ea.com/games/mass-effect/mass-effect-legendary-edition.
Fandom Wiki Contributors (2010) Mutalisk (StarCraft II). StarCraft Wiki. Available online: https://starcraft.fandom.com/wiki/Mutalisk_(StarCraft_II)
Fletcher, M. (2016) The Amazing Eyes of a Horse Fly. Flickr. Available online: https://www.flickr.com/photos/134832191@N08/27209226373/
Games Workshop, Exocrine. (n.d.) Exocrine. Available online: https://www.games-workshop.com/en-GB/Exocrine.
Games Workshop, Hormagaunt. (n.d.) Tyranid Hormagaunt Brood. Available online: https://www.games-workshop.com/en-GB/Tyranid-Hormagaunt-Brood-12-Models.
Games Workshop, Zoanthrope. (n.d.) Tyranid Zoanthrope. Available online: https://www.games-workshop.com/en-GB/Zoanthropes.
Giger, H.R. (1976) Necronom IV.
Pixologic (1999) Pixologic : ZBrush – The all-in-one-digital sculpting solution. Pixologic – Home of ZBrush. Available online: https://pixologic.com/.
Pralier, R. (2014a) Mass Effect 3 Banshee. Art Station. Available online: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/4XaQl.
Pralier, R. (2014b) Rodrigue Pralier Art Station Portfolio. Art Station. Available online: https://rodrigue_pralier.artstation.com/.
Trello (2014) Trello. @trello. Available online: https://trello.com/en.
Wiki Contributors (2005) Tyranid – Warhammer 40k – Lexicanum. wh40k.lexicanum.com. Available online: https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Tyranid
Wikipedia Contributors (2019a) Black garden ant. Wikipedia. Available online: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_garden_ant.
Wikipedia Contributors (2019b) H. R. Giger. Wikipedia. Available online: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._R._Giger.